Tiny Furniture

Lena Dunham is a hot property these days with Girls, her HBO series now in its second season. But Tiny Furniture is a film that Dunham wrote, directed and stars in as Aura. It was her second feature film – the first, Creative Nonfiction, premiered at SXSW in March 2009.

What caught my attention about it initially was an article that mentioned that it was made on a Canon EOS 7D. That’s an under $2000 digital SLR camera. And the film played in theaters and got good reviews. Wow, filmmaking is really changing. In a good way.

The film’s story – as dizzyingly described on the film’s website – starts like this:

22-year-old Aura returns home to her artist mother’s TriBeCa loft with the following: a useless film theory degree, 357 hits on her YouTube page, a boyfriend who’s left her to find himself at Burning Man, a dying hamster, and her tail between her legs. Luckily, her trainwreck childhood best friend never left home, the restaurant down the block is hiring, and ill-advised romantic possibilities lurk around every corner. Aura quickly throws away her liberal-arts clogs and careens into her old/new life: a dead-end hostess job, parties on chilly East Village fire escapes, stealing twenties out of her mother’s Prada purse, pathetic Brooklyn “art shows,” prison-style tattoos done out of sheer boredom, drinking all the wine in her mother’s neatly organized cabinets, competing with her prodigious teenage sister, and desperate sex in a giant metal pipe…

http://www.tinyfurniture.com